Stevington Windmill Sunset

Sometimes a scene just deserves a photo and on this sunset the colours were tempting us too much on the way back from a local video shoot. We managed to get the drone out just in time to capture the windmill at Stevington with just enough light to bring it into the photo with the stunning sunset colours in the background. So how did we take it?

Well, as mentioned above we used our phantom 4 pro drone and the great thing about this drone is that it gives professional quality results and only takes a few minutes to get in the air, time was of the essence to get the shot before we lost these lovely colours, thankfully there was not much wind either so we know the drone would be nice and stable for the photo.

We took the drone up to about 50 feet and angles the camera so as to keep around one third of the sky in shot and the other two thirds with the foreground in, this is the most pleasing composition for the human eye and is known as “the rule of thirds”.

Next, we set the exposure for the photo by metering for the sky. This was because we were shooting in RAW and therefore we knew that in post processing that we could recover a significant amount of the shadows.

Finally, after we were happy with our composition, we took the photo and got the drone down to head home and look at our results in our photo editing software (Lightroom).

On editing the photo we could of easily left the windmill as a silhouette and refrained from bringing back the shadows. However on looking at the photo it just seemed to lack character and by bringing the windmill back to life it seemed to give the photo much more depth. Bringing back shadows will almost always give a bit more noise to a photograph but in this instance we think it was worth it, especially as this is a local landmark and just seeing it in a silhouette just did not do it justice. We then added a vinette to bring the viewers eye even more towards the windmill.

Finally we edited the photo out as a high quality Jpeg so as we could print it for our office wall and also to share it with the world here on our blog!

At ADC Films we love making great videos for businesses that reach out to their target audience. We also enjoy our photography and whenever we get the chance, where it’s a DSLR camera or drone, we take pictures to seize special moments. This sunset at the Stevington Windmill was crying out for a photo that evening and lucky for us we were close enough to get one, we hope you enjoy it.